E-A-M and the great emu adventure

it's our first weekend here in manoel viana and our supervisors have decided to go out of town for the 2 days.
after a killer week of orientation and being in constant conflict over stupid things thanks to cultural differences in the classroom, it was time to bond a little bit with each other.
last night one of the host families to 2 of the girls in our group (marie-claude and nicole) put on a party at their home, where we had churrasciaro, danced, and drank.
alcohol here is unbelievably cheap.
you can buy a HUGE bottle of beer (600mL) for less than a dollar canadian. you can also get a 40 or bacardi for about 10$.
our brazilian countrerparts taught us how to samba (or tried to.. i apparently don't have the ability to dance to anything but electro), and we danced to classic rock and brazilian music all night.
we played dancing games, slow danced with each other, took retarded pictures, made things intensely awkward on purpose and relived all those awkward dance moments from middle school.
today we all met up at 10am and one of the host mothers to another pair of girls (jessie and meribel) chartered a bus for all 18 of us to go out to a farm just outside of the city.
the bus ride out to the farm was completely unreal. i cant even describe the feeling. there were green fields everywhere, cows running around, we saw fucking emus running, and the bus had to stop for sheep crossing the road.
for the last 5 days we've been confined to this city and trying to find out how things work here, but today it was like i finally got to see brazil proper.
there were definitely some points where i wished that everyone from at home was here to see al thsi with me.
i spent most of the day wandering out in the fields with 2 of the canadians (aymoman and elliott). when we got to the farm, everyone decided it would be an amazing idea to trek the 3.5 kilometers out in the fields to the river.. elliott, ayman and i started out later, and just ended up trekking out there on our own after we'd lost the others.
it was amazing, there were fields of grass and rolling hills and random sand dunes once we got closer to the water.
on the way back we took a wrong turn and ended up on some really wet and marshy land. long story short - as much as the boys tried to help me by lifting me to hop over fences and stuff, they couldn't help me jump cleanly over muddy ditches. in the end by the time we got back to the farm (some 2.5 hours later) we spent the rest of the day running around barefoot in the grass, and i had to borrow pants from Lorna. my converse were soaked through with mud.
aymoman found this amazing skull that everyone thought belonged to a cat, and we randomly wrote our names and drew the canadian flag in the sand at the sand dunes for someone to find the next time anyone decides to go that far out.
today has probably been the best day so far. i spent the rest of the day just sitting outside and soaking up the sun and the view.
i have some pretty great photos, but i dont have a cable to upload them with. ill eventaully get them on here.. but for now, i'll leave it with this giant block of text.